How many times do I hear business owners say, 'I know how I want my website to look!'

Business owners need to understand and recognise that their business' web presence should not be based on their personal views but rather to promote their business and ultimately profit from that professional online presence.

Business owners need to focus their attentions on the critical issues that really matter to the visitor as they are your potential customer and that means they are your most important audience!

Some critical steps to building a great web presence that your visitors will appreciate are:

1. Spell checking - I know it sounds simple but so many make mistakes
2. Reduce flash elements - use only what you need to sell messages
3. Build in clean code - ensure HTML is validated to ensure optimal SEO results
4. Reduce image sizes - this will optimise the page load times, very important to the search engines
5. Check for broken links - broken links will affect your SEO attempts
6. Simple navigation - make the user journey easy to understand and follow
7. Simplify content - make content easy to read; think of your readers and offer interesting and engaging content
8. Content placement - make sure that your most important messages can be seen quickly and easily
9. Customer Service - contact details, enquiry forms, terms of business etc are all very important if you want to make your visitor feel at ease
10. Test and Measure - you should never just build a website and leave it, you need to continuously test and make changes as required.

And finally, ensure that the user experience is satisfying. That way you will develop audience retention strategies and your visitors will return time and time again.

There are many more rules that need to be applied when building a professional Web Solution, but as a starting point the above list, if implemented, will make a positive impact on your rankings and your visitor satisfaction levels, thereby increasing your enquiries and lead generation strategies online!